Between the World and Me

The phrase that succeeded in yanking my head to an oblique angle came just one page into Ta-Nehisi Coates's polemic work.

“Americans who believe that they are white.”

It was a flip in perspective that instantly explained so much about my failure to understand “race” in America. It explained why I've always felt so awkward checking the “White” box on demographic surveys. My ancestors came from the desert by way of Eastern Europe and Russia. They endowed me with a broad spectrum of color. We're not white. We've never been white. “White” was a fabrication needed to justify the enslavement of a people. There is no white.

About a page later, Coates writes, “But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.” That line twisted my head the rest of the way around.

This book is devastatingly clear minded and courageous. It's the manner of courage that only comes from anger engendered over generations. I wondered, of the thousands who have read his book, how many started off as I did believing they were liberal minded and enlightened only to be mercilessly slapped down and reawakened?

But surely this book isn't written for us – Americans who think of themselves as white – but for Coates' son and his generation and the children to follow. As Coates says in the final passages, “They made us a race. We made ourselves a people.” The struggle continues with little to point to in the way of progress as rare voices like Coates' make us feel equally ashamed and proud to be human.